The present invention pertains to a method for establishing a common basis for the exchange and processing of transducer (i.e. sensor and emitter) data acquired from a plurality of diverse transducers. In particular, the invention pertains to a method and apparatus for providing a common basis for capturing data in real time from diverse transducers. The data may be used immediately or may be archived without corruption.
Currently standards exist for the capture of data. However, current standards do not meet the accuracy and efficiency requirements for capturing in real-time multi-sensor data. Indeed, the failure to characterize data as sensor data misdirects the task and undermines the objectives of efficient and effective data capture.
In many data capture applications, it is desirable to obtain data from one or more transducers at various locations. These data may be produced by various devices and may be expressed in a variety of forms. In order to be useful in a meaningful way, these data must be processed and correlated. However, the data is difficult to correlate because data from one type of transducer may be incompatable with the data from other types of transducers, and it is necessary to reconfigure the expression of the data in order to facilitate their utilization. Such reconfiguration sometimes results in a corruption of the data from its original form, which in turn results in a loss of accuracy.
In addition, these data must be appropriately organized so that data from related devices may be accurately tracked in time and space. Such organization requires the generation of meta-data, i.e. data about data, having a complexity which increases as the complexity of the expressed form of the transducer data increases. This complex meta-data consumes valuable processor memory and diminishes processor efficiency.
The data produced by various transducers may be generated at different times and at different frequencies or intervals depending on the system requirements. For example, it may be necessary to record the position, or temperature of a sensor less frequently than it is necessary to record the image produced by such sensor. This is because the image may change more frequently than the temperature of the sensor, and the motion of the sensor may be uniform, and hence its position may be readily computed.
At the same time, it may be necessary, in a particular application, to correlate the primary image data with the secondary temporal, positional and temperature data. In conventional systems this secondary data may be inserted in a header as meta-data preceding the image data. This form of data acquisition results in high processor overhead, and is inefficient and inconvenient to handle.
Finally, it is difficult to transmit large amounts of data in an efficient manner, especially where the large amounts of complex meta-data are involved. Here too, complexities associated with the diverse expression of data increase communications system requirements, particularly bandwidth and processor speed.